ARt: Augmented Reality

Although the world is abuzz with the first successful and widely popular game using Augmented Reality (AR), Pokémon GO, artists have been creating AR art for years. Joseph Farbrook, John Craig Freeman, Will Pappenheimer and Zachary Brady are all pioneers and early adapters of AR technology. The Boston Cyberarts Gallery is proud to present these artists in ARt: Augmented Reality for our first exhibition of the season.

Drawing Constellations by Will Pappenheimer, in collaboration with Zachary Brady, is an interactive drawing, installation, and app that uploads drawings to a constantly moving and evolving 3-dimensional “constellation” situated within and outside of the gallery. Upon creating a drawing on a tablet, the user’s drawing is then transferred into 3D augmented reality space, superimposed and sited at the gallery by GPS location.

Defending Virtual by Joseph Farbrook is an AR artwork in which a one hundred-dollar bill rests on a traditional pedestal, inciting temptation. When viewed through a tablet screen, the bill is defended by a hand holding a gun, waving and aiming throughout the room, making threatening gestures at anyone who gets too close. As money is arbitrarily produced by governments, traded wildly on the stock exchange, and commoditized into debt, what exactly does it currently represent? Both its value and defense of its value have become entirely virtual, yet the consequences of this are often devastatingly real.

Green Street & AR, by John Craig Freeman, is a site-specific AR art piece for smart phones and mobile devices. There are particular locations around the world where network activity has become so intense that the virtual world has begun to penetrate into the real. Objects appear to replicate and float off into the sky. Entire buildings lose their mooring and drift away at the intersection of Green Street & AR.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Joseph Farbrook grew up in New York City and Santa Fe, raised by his father, a concrete poet and his mother, a painter. His artwork has taken the form of electronic installations, interactive video, augmented and virtual reality narratives. He has also developed media-reflexive live performances mixed with interactive screen projections. His latest work explores the intersections of the physical and virtual in art. Farbrook exhibits his work regularly in galleries and museums worldwide, including SIGGRAPH, The Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, The AC Institute in NYC, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, MFA and Cyberarts Gallery Boston, and Waterman’s Gallery London. Joseph Farbrook is an Associate Professor at the University of Arizona.

John Craig Freeman is a public artist with over twenty-five years of experience using emergent technologies to produce large-scale public work at sites where the forces of globalization are impacting the lives of individuals in local communities. With his work, Freeman seeks to expand the notion of public by exploring how digital networked technology is transforming our sense of place. Freeman is a founding member of the international artists collective Manifest.AR and he has produced work and exhibited around the world including in London, Mexico City, Calgary, Havana, Kalinigrad, Warsaw, Zurich, Belfast, Venice, Istanbul, Copenhagen, Milano, Sydney, Singapore, Liverpool, Coimbra, Basel, Paris, across Americaas well as Beijing, Xi’an, Wuhan and Hong Kong.

In 2016 he traveled to Wuhan China as part of the U.S. State Department’s American Arts Incubator program administered by ZERO1. In 2015, he was the recipient of a commission from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Art + Technology program. He has also had work commissioned by Rhizome.org and Turbulence.org and he was awarded one of the last Individual Artist Fellowships by the NEA in 1992. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, El Pais, Liberation, Wired News, Artforum, Ten-8, Z Magazine, Afterimage, Photo Metro, New Art Examiner, Time, Harper’s and Der Spiegel. Christiane Paul cites Freeman’s work in her book Digital Art, as does Lucy Lippard in the Lure of the Local, and Margot Lovejoy in Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age. His writing has been published in Rhizomes, Leonardo, the Journal of Visual Culture, and Exposure. Freeman received a Bachelor of Art degree from the University of California, San Diego in 1986 and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1990. He is currently a Professor of New Media Art at Emerson College in Boston.

Will Pappeneheimer is a Brooklyn based artist working in new media, performance and installation with an interest in shifting spatial and object relations, often as a form of institutional or spatial intervention. His work often explores at the confluence or tension of virtual and physical worlds, as this intersection represents a particularly fruitful area of contemporary aesthetic, experiential and social exploration. He is a founding member of the Manifest.AR collective. His projects and performances have been shown internationally at Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA, Los Angeles; San Francisco MOMA; Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; FACT, Liverpool, UK; Contemporary Istanbul Art Fair, Istanbul; Kunstraum Walcheturm, Zurich; Fringe Exhibitions in Los Angeles; the ICA, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Exit Art and the New Museum in New York; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington; the Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast; FILE, Sao Paulo, BR; Turbulance.org; Xi’an Academy of Art Gallery in China. The artist’s works have been reviewed in Christiane Paulʼs recent historical edition of “Digital Art,” a chapter of Gregory Ulmerʼs theoretical book “Electronic Monuments,” Art in America, New York Times, Hyperallergic.org, WIRED, Modern Painters, the Boston Globe, EL PAIS, Madrid, Liberation, Paris, and Art US. He is a professor and Associate Chair of the Art Department at Pace University, New York.

Zachary Brady is an artist, user experience designer, and web developer from Brooklyn, NY. He is a Partner and Director of Technology at Suits & Sandals, LLC where he oversees the production of digital products including websites and apps. His art practice plays off of his technological background and focuses on the creation of interactive pieces. His goal is to make the viewer an inseparable aspect of each piece. Among the places he has shown include the Whitney Museum in New York City, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, Virtual Switzerland at Basel Munsterplats, and the FACT Museum in Liverpool, England.